Joomla is a popular free and open-source content management system (CMS) that can be used to power all kinds of websites. After we published developer’s toolboxes for a variety of other CMS’, many readers requested a collection of resources for Joomla users and developers, so here it is. Joomla grew out of the Mambo1 CMS and has since built a large and loyal group of users, much like the other popular open-source options. What this means for users and developers is that there is a wealth of information and resources available, and in this post we’ll take a look at many of the best.

4. Joomla Templates

The Joomla community has already created thousands of templates. There are several different websites that offer premium theme membership clubs, and there are also plenty of free templates available. Here we’ll look at some of the best places to get free and premium templates.

JoomlaJunkie50
JoomlaJunkie offers club memberships that give users, designers and developers access to premium templates, and it also offers several free templates51.

DJoomla72
A collection of free user-submitted templates, among other resources.

SiteGround73
This hosting company provides a number of free templates for Joomla users.

OSSkins74
A home for free and premium templates for Joomla, WordPress and Drupal.

5. Extensions, Plug-Ins, Add-Ons

Like any other open-source CMS, Joomla comes with certain features and functionality out of the box, but additional features are available through extensions, plug-ins and add-ons. Like the templates, some are free and some are premium. In this section, we’ll include links to the best places to find the right extensions for your projects.

6. Inspiration

If you would like to see what other designers and developers have been able to accomplish with Joomla, you’re in luck. There are several websites dedicated to Joomla inspiration, and a few others that include Joomla along with inspiration from other CMS’.

CMS Showcase97
There are currently almost 40 Joomla-powered websites featured on CMS Showcase.

Joomla Showcase98
The Joomla forums include an area for showing off custom Joomla templates and getting inspiration from the work of others.

Joomla Zone99
Joomla Zone includes a Joomla Powered section, where website owners and designers can submit their Joomla-powered websites to be displayed

7. Compared to Other CMS’

If you haven’t used Joomla before, you’re probably wondering how it stacks up against other CMS options. The following resources, featuring the opinions of others on Joomla and other open-source CMS’, should help. Keep in mind that each has its own strengths and weaknesses, and no CMS is right for every project.

Steven Snell is a Web designer and blogger. In addition to maintaining his own blog and writing for a number of other top design blogs, he also manages an online shop that offers premium graphic design resources.

Mark Ho

I’ll plug open-source concrete 5. The interface is great and installation, upgrading and templating is pretty easy. It also has page versioning, a decent set of permission tools, a bunch of useful core modules/blocks you can pop into the your content areas (autonavs, search, contact forms, polls, video, audio, maps, etc.) and a click and drag sitemap to help you organizing content intuitively. And no, I’m not a member of the concrete 5 dev team, lol. Just someone who really likes the CMS in comparison with Drupal. and joomla. That said, I’m still going to use Drupal for large community content driven sites but concrete5 is a great choice in my opinion for small to medium sized sites.

skont

terre

Joomla is seriously a total nightmare and I’m completely baffled as to why it gets such rave reviews from everyone. It’s like the Star Trek 2009 of the CMS world. Not only is this thing over six megs (even when packed… what exactly am I installing here?) its code habits and syntax are so ass-backwards and counterintuitive that I almost get the impression a team of coders were split and locked into separate rooms and told to come up with something that’d be put together after the fact. The templates and plugins are so poorly documented (following Joomla’s lead I suppose) and clash with each other so badly that you can actually spend months rewriting code that would’ve taken less time to just develop yourself from scratch.

Jamey Warren

I worked with mambo and joomla since very long and In my view Joomla is the best known CMS around on web and the beauty is that it’s free for everyone.

I like to thank Steven for his hard work in compiling such a good list but I’m still wondring that how he missed so many other good Joomla resource sites operated by core Mambo and joomla team members like YooTheme, Gavik etc..

virender Kumar

Codefire Technologies is providing joomla plugins to block access of the site from any IP in in certain countries and to display author details on Joomla articles. http://www.codefire.org/open-source.html

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